Tom Foremski — an early advocate for brand publishing — has joined Weber Shandwick’s content division Mediaco on a project basis.

“I’m working on an interesting project with Mediaco’s West Coast lead Luca Penati and an enthusiastic team of professionals across many disciplines and locations,” Foremski posted on his blog Silicon Valley Watcher. “This is what’s needed in today’s digital media worlds — the complexities of managing fragmented media channels and user interfaces across many devices requires integrated tech, media, design, SEO and communications professionals on the same publishing teams.”

Foremski started Silicon Valley Watcher in 2004 after nearly five years at the Financial Times. In 2009, he somewhat famously said, “Every company is now a media company. It doesn’t matter if it makes network gear or diapers, every company needs to publish to its various communities.” He’s since expanded on this, calling for brands to invest in sophisticated tools and apps for successful publishing.

“Enterprises will need a lot of media technologies and this will become a new genre of enterprise apps, more important than ERP and CRM,” he advocates on the blog. “Selling media technologies to the enterprise will be a lucrative business and it is one that makes full use of advanced cloud technologies and subscription business models.”

Last week, Weber Shandwick launched Mediaco Publish — a content management system that combines publishing technology with a user-friendly interface designed for brand content operations. With the technology launch, Weber also started a new technology unit within MediaCo focused on evaluating and deploying technologies related to brand publishing.

“In our extensive work supporting client efforts, we’ve investigated and even worked with a number of content management systems powering top-tier digital media outlets today,” said Eric Helgesen, EVP of technical product development, who leads the new unit. “It became clear there wasn’t a CMS leveraging best-in-class technology from the media world that was also tuned to the unique needs of brand-centric content operations. We decided to address the gap ourselves by building Mediaco Publish.”